#实话实说#
Yonghui Supermarket, which used to be the "first brother" of local supermarkets, began to sell off.
Recently, Yonghui Supermarket issued an announcement on the sale of assets, saying that Sichuan Commercial Investment Co., Ltd. intends to purchase 136 million shares of Hongqi chain shares held by the company from Yonghui Supermarket in cash, with a total transfer price of about 799 million yuan.
Not long ago, Yonghui Supermarket just sold 1.43% of its Wanda Commercial Management shares to Dalian Yujin Trading Co., Ltd. at a price of 4.53 billion yuan.
Once upon a time, Yonghui Supermarket was once regarded as the "light of China's retail", and when it was in its glory, it was second only to Wal-Mart and Home Depot, and was the "first brother" of China's local supermarkets.
However, since the end of 2017, the retail giant has suffered continuous losses, especially in the past 3 years, in 2021, Yonghui Supermarket lost 3.944 billion yuan, in 2022, it lost 2.763 billion yuan again, and lost 6.7 billion yuan in two years, and the previous 4 years were basically in vain.
Not only that, in the past three years, Yonghui Supermarket's asset-liability ratio has remained high, with its asset-liability ratio as high as 84.47%, 87.68% and 86.54% at the end of 2021, the end of 2022 and the first three quarters of 2023, respectively.
As of September 30, Yonghui Supermarket's debt has reached 47.240 billion yuan.
Yonghui, which is now in the "big sale" mode, is shrinking with all its might, reserving cash, and surviving its trough period.
It's just that under the external worries and internal difficulties, can Yonghui Supermarket still break the situation?
"The first fresh stock in supermarkets"
In 1995, Zhang Xuansong, a young man from Fujian who did not finish high school, opened the predecessor of Yonghui Supermarket, "Gule Weili Supermarket", and became a supermarket boss.
At the beginning, Yonghui Supermarket was no different from its peers, even if it was located at Fuzhou Railway Station, it still couldn't do big brands such as Metro and Wal-Mart, and its business progress was slow.
But Zhang Xuansong's outstanding thing is that he found the grasp of fresh food and identified a path: to transform to fresh food.
At that time, the fresh food area of ordinary supermarkets only accounted for 20% of the total area, and most of the sales were some frozen meat and root vegetables, as for the reason is also very simple, the storage time is long, the turnover pressure is small, compared with fresh meat and leafy vegetables, the loss is smaller, and the cost is lower.
Zhang Xuansong's Yonghui supermarket, on the other hand, increased the fresh area to 70% of the total area, and mainly sold some fresh meat and leafy vegetables, and even advanced the opening time to 6:30 in order to grab the morning market.
By 2001, Yonghui Supermarket had a small scale with its special fresh food model, and it coincided with the country's start to promote the "agricultural reform and super" project, and officially embarked on the development highway.
Three years later, Yonghui Supermarket opened 50 stores, and in 2010, Yonghui Supermarket has landed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, with a revenue of more than 10 billion, and is known as "the first fresh stock of supermarkets".
Although the crisis of the offline retail industry began to brew at this time, and the e-commerce industry was booming, Yonghui Supermarket still went against the current and continued to soar after receiving the help of the capital market, with revenue exceeding 42 billion yuan in 2015, and the number of stores as high as 1,275 in 2018, and the market value also exceeded the threshold of 100 billion yuan.
However, even if Yonghui Supermarket sits in the position of the first brother of the local supermarket, it is still inevitably hit by the dimensionality reduction of Internet players, and the situation is becoming more and more difficult.
The "local first brother" is worried about the outside and the inside
No matter how good Yonghui Supermarket is, it is essentially an offline retail model, with low gross profit margin and high expense rate, and how to transfer from offline to online are all problems it faces.
In particular, the impact of e-commerce on offline is even more unbearable for Yonghui.
In 2016, the first Hema was born, and then spread across the country like a spark, Yonghui Supermarket suddenly felt that its status was threatened, so it followed suit and launched the "Super Species" in 2017.
According to Yonghui's vision, "Super Species" wanted to do "catering + supermarket + digital retail", but in the end, it not only failed to give full play to its comprehensive advantages, but also failed to successfully launch the brand, and failed in only two years.
In 2018, Yonghui Supermarket began to make "mini stores" again, this time also investing heavily, opening nearly 600 stores in 2019 alone.
According to media statistics, from October 2020 to March 2021, Yonghui Supermarket closed a total of 336 mini stores, declaring failure again.
The key here is that Yonghui Supermarket has to expand aggressively and test the new business format, all of which are to use real money to fight, to put it bluntly, the more you spend, the more you lose.
This also led to the loss of 6.7 billion in 2021 and 2022, and Yonghui Supermarket entered a cold winter period.
And this is not over, in addition to the "external worries", Yonghui Supermarket is also facing major personnel turmoil such as "internal difficulties".
In August 2021, Li Guo, CEO of Yonghui Supermarket, resigned and was replaced by Li Songfeng, senior director of JD.com.
Under the external worries and internal difficulties, how to survive the cold winter and turn the tables against the wind has become the top priority of Yonghui Supermarket.
Yonghui Supermarket's way to break the game
After repeatedly failing to test the waters of new business formats, Yonghui Supermarket is now eyeing discount stores again.
The person in charge of Yonghui Supermarket said that discount stores are a major trend in the retail industry in the current market environment, and they have various advantages such as speeding up the efficiency of commodity replacement and enriching the variety of goods.
And unlike other discount stores, Yonghui Supermarket is not going to "start anew" and open stores independently, but to set up a discount store area within Yonghui Supermarket to integrate this model into the existing system.
In addition, in terms of the selection of discount products, Yonghui Supermarket intends to select a part of some internal products to enter the discount product pool, and sell them at 7%, 5% and 3% off according to the specific situation, which is also different from other discount stores.
In fact, in the face of such a new business model as discount stores, Wumart, Hema and Jiajiayue are also making layouts, and Yonghui Supermarket is belated, and it seems to be suspected of following the trend.
But at the same time, the new way of playing discount stores will have higher requirements for the supply chain management, inventory management and operational capabilities of supermarkets, and these are precisely the advantages of Yonghui Supermarket, after all, it started as a fresh product.
It's just that the world is changing, and it is too early to make a conclusion about whether Yonghui Supermarket can get out of the predicament and make a beautiful turnaround.
Write at the end:
In August this year, there was news that Yonghui Supermarket was too short of money and wanted to "sell" JD.com.
But judging from the frequent "fire sales" of Yonghui supermarkets today, I am afraid that there is no such plan in the short term, and the former first brother of the local supermarket is still trying to tide over the difficulties.